Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and co-founder of last week's World Science Festival, has been described by the Washington Post as the “single best explainer of abstruse ideas in the world today.” Greene's talent for using narrative to explain the complexities of physics was on display at two events bookending this year's festival — a performance of the stage adaptation of Brian Greene's book Icarus at the Edge of Time that opened the festival, and his dramatized lecture "Spooky Action: The Drama of Quantum Mechanics" on the last evening of the festival. 

Icarus at the Edge of Time, originally published by Knopf (2008), is a science fiction adaptation of the Greek myth of Icarus in which Daedalus escapes Crete with his son Icarus using wings built from feathers and wax, only to watch Icarus fly too close to the sun and plummet to the sea. Greene’s version of the myth substitutes spaceships for wax wings and a black hole for the sun. This year's adaptation of the book included a performance of the Phillip Glass-composed score by the Orchestra of St. Luke's, narration by LaVar Burton and a film created by British artists Al + Al.

Clearly intended for a younger crowd (much of the audience consisted of educators and elementary to high school-aged children), Greene made sure to point out an important modification from the Icarus myth. While it doesn't exactly have a happy ending, the protagonist's overreaching doesn't result in death but a challenging discovery: that circling the black hole's edge for what felt like minutes turned out to be 10,000 years. In addition to teaching some of the basic physics of black holes, the moral of Greene's adaptation of the myth was geared toward scientific discovery; not discouraging pushing the limits but simply cautioning against the potential consequences. Read more...

Simon Hauger, who presented at PopTech both last year and this year, began the Hybrid X Team at West Philadelphia High School 13 years ago to engage his students in math, science and engineering and help them apply the concepts they were learning in school. The students in this after-school program have won multiple national competitions with the hybrid vehicles they designed and built.

Hauger has now taken that experience and applied it to The Workshop School — a school for high school seniors that’s been established to challenge students to solve real-world problems.

Watch SImon Hauger talk with student Azeem Hill at PopTech 2010.

The Eyeo Festival, a three-day conference in Minneapolis, MN brings together experts from the worlds of art, programming, experience design and data visualization. Included in this year’s speakers are familiar PopTech faces like Heather Knight, Zach Liebermann, Nicholas Felton, and Jer Thorp. Watch for updates from the Festival through Wednesday.

Incorporating multiple disciplines into her work including genetics, biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering, Natalie Jeremijenko produces art which displays abstract, global environmental problems in immediately observable ways. As the director of New York University’s Environmental Health Clinic she attempts to show how environmental health and personal health can be seen as one and the same.

Jeremijenko presented on Monday night at the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis, MN, covering a wide range of projects (or “prescriptions” as she calls them) including fish-sensing Amphibious Architecture, pollutant-sniffing robot dogs, a directory of photo essays about how everyday objects are manufactured, and a solar chimney that collects black carbon and reformulates it as pencil lead (to name a few).

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The Eyeo Festival, a three-day conference in Minneapolis, MN brings together experts from the worlds of art, programming, experience design and data visualization. Included in this year’s speakers are familiar PopTech faces like Heather Knight, Zach Liebermann, Nicholas Felton, and Jer Thorp. Watch for updates from the Festival through Wednesday.

The title of Moritz Stefaner’s talk at the Eyeo Festival on Monday was “Truth & Beauty,” which are “the two maxims that should guide [an information visualizer’s] work.” This idea was a common thread throughout his talk, as he emphasized the importance of putting data first — and approaching information design as a process of discovery rather than invention.

The first project Stefaner walked through was Notabilia (see image above), a visualization of deletion conversations from Wikipedia. From the project’s website:

Any [Wikipedia] editor can nominate an article for deletion and, if this nomination is legitimate, a community discussion takes place where any fellow…editors have the opportunity to make their voices heard.

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Pieter Hoff is renewing a tried-and-true environmentalist mission: saving the world by planting trees. But Hoff has the technology to go with it; he’s engineering new ways to nurture trees in some of the world’s driest, harshest climates.

He begins by identifying a problem: millions of people are already going hungry, and 10 billion more will be coming as the world’s population grows. He asks: “Is there a possibility that we can feed those people?” He then identifies another problem: an excess of CO² in the atmosphere and the resultant global warming.

His solution to both is the Groasis Waterboxx: a device that “drinks from the air” by collecting condensation and storing it, therefore becoming a sort of “water battery.” He says the biggest challenge for plants in arid climates is not the amount of rain, but the consistency: it’s the dry seasons that kill any chance of growth. The Waterboxx proposes to solve that by creating a continuous source of water from occasional rainfalls.

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Stephen Vitiello is a sound artist looking to open his audience to the world of vibrations. His career has spanned from electronic music to scoring experimental videos to his most recent form of work — larger-scale public installations that make immersive soudscapes accessible to a wider audience.

He started his PopTech presentation off with a story of an encounter in Sydney, Australia, where he had installed “The Sound Of Red Earth” at the Sydney brickworks. Vitiello recalled how a young girl had pulled him aside to shyly ask him a question — “do you ever just lean down and put your ear to the table to listen to the sounds?” It seems that this sense of child-like wonder and curiosity is what he hopes to evoke with his work.

Vitiello also told of his experience as a resident artist in the World Trade Center in 1999. He spent six months working out of a studio on the 91st floor of Tower One, and used contact microphones to record the building’s internal sounds at all times of day. An excerpt from one recording during a severe storm revealed the internal creakings of the massive building under stress.

Stephen’s most recent public sound installation, called “A Bell for Every Minute,” is placed in Manhattan’s High Line Park. Vitiello sampled bell sounds from throughout New York City’s five boroughs, including the New York Stock Exchange, the United Nations Peace Bell, and the recently excavated Coney Island Dreamland bell. He finished his talk with a recording of the sound that plays at the High Line installation every hour — all of the 59 bells layered into one room-filling sound.

(Photo credit: Kris Krüg)